He never tired of describing the circumstances of his birth--in a tenement on New York City's Lower East Side--as "the urban equivalent of being born in a log cabin." Like many other second-generation Americans, Jacob Koppel Javits was impelled by his humble origins into a life of public service that carried him from his ghetto "log cabin" to the halls of legislative power. Few made the journey with more confidence and gusto, and fewer still left behind a legacy of greater political achievement. When he died last week at 81, of complications from a degenerative nerve and muscle disease known as...
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